Lemmata updating again, and apocalypse

For those (any?) that have been following my daily scribbley comic thingie, Lemmata: because of abysmal laziness and NaNoWriMo, I slipped with the updates.

I got better.

The daily bits for the 3rd to the 9th are going up hourly at the moment.

For those who don’t follow that, here’s an incredibly short story.

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THE REASON WHY

In the year 2012, the apocalypse came. There was fire, and poison, and the whole Earth and all in it was contaminated and lost, and doomed to quickly perish. It was an unexpected disaster, and unavoidable: a noxious death a million years in the making.

While this all was going on, a spaceship appeared overhead.

That which guided it was willing to help; but not even that alien within did have the power to save the Earth.

No; though the alien within was one giant electric computer hivemind, and so ancient it had seen stars kindle and die, it knew just this: the Earth was lost. All of it was contaminated, and nothing of it could be touched save with a sword.

So the alien cast down great rays that killed many people; and in killing them performed the requisite brain scans to reconstruct their minds, their essences, inside the alien computer.

And it cast down great electric nets, and scooped in a great torrent up wholesale all that was in the great, various, glorious human electric distributed database called the Internet; and so in addition to a portion of humankind, a portion of its culture and history was saved.

And the alien hivemind moved away, leaving a lost and dead planet behind, and moving considered the sad plight of humankind, bereft of all its material possessions, reduced to a ghost in the machine, with the jumbled remains of the Internet as its scenery. No more Rome, or the pyramids — just pictures and words of them; holiday snaps and architects’ schematics.

No more cats; just pictures of them.

The alien saw this, and felt pity; and in its small power did what it could, and cast an electric ghost back in time.

That ghost came to the beginnings of the Internet, for an electric ghost could go nowhere else; and it was ever there calling until the day of doom and the day of the hivemind came again: and it called: “Preserve! Copy! Pirate! Torrent everything!”

And that is why those things are done with such compulsion: why the book pirate will never read his whole library, and the pictures of cats overflow the Internet — for books and cats are precious, and one day will be no more.